| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: flaunt his courage; and the man's nobler mind is expressed in his
exclamation:
"Des chevaliers de ma patrie
L'honneur toujours fut le soutien!
"And finally, to crown the work, the theme comes in which sounded the
note of fatality at the beginning. Thus, the leading strain, the
magnificent call to the deed:
"Nonnes qui reposez sous cette froide pierre,
M'entendez-vous?
"The career of the music, gloriously worked out, is gloriously
finished by the /allegro vivace/ of the bacchanalian chorus in D
Gambara |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: friend's question about the buildings. No; but that is not it. At the
bottom, both questions are an invasion of the same deep-seated thing--the
right to privacy. In America, what with the newspaper reporters and this
and that and the other, the territory of a man's privacy has been
lessened and lessened until very little of it remains; but most of us
still do draw the line somewhere; we may not all draw it at the same
place, but we do draw a line. The difference, then, between ourselves and
the English in this respect is simply, that with them the territory of a
man's privacy covers more ground, and different ground as well. An
Englishman doesn't expect strangers to ask him questions of a guide-book
sort. For all such questions his English system provides perfectly
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